It is common practice in the telephone industry to provide at intervals on a telephone cable, a load coil assembly which consists of a plurality of individual toroidal coils with the wires of each coil connected in series with the wires of the telephone cable. A variety of methods are used to produce load coils, that is, to mount them in a suitable casing and to provide the connections between the individual toroidal coils and the lead wires which extend to the multi-conductor telephone cable.
One widely used packaging system for load coils comprises a load coil assembly which contains a plurality of identical load coil cartridges. Each cartridge contains a plurality of load coils and terminal means are provided on the cartridge for connecting the coil wires contained in the cartridge to the lead wires. Heretofor, a simple solder tab type terminal has been used which, while effective, involves time-consuming and inconvenient assembly and production processes, so that a relatively high cost of the cartridge results. It would be desirable to provide wire-in-slot type terminations and connections for both the coil wires and the lead wires of such coil cartridges and to otherwise reduce the time required to produce such cartridges. The present invention is directed to the achievement of an improved coil cartridge having wire-in-slot type terminating means and to improved methods of producing coil cartridges for load coil assemblies.
In accordance with the invention, the coil cartridge housing is produced as a hinged cylindrical member which when open is adapted to receive a stack of individual toroidal coils. The invention also requires the use of terminal housings having terminal-receiving cavities for terminals which are adapted to establish contact with both coil wires and lead wires. The terminal housings and the coil housing have interengaging means thereon, such that when coils are placed in the coil housing and the coil housing is closed, the terminal housings can be assembled to the coil housings and the interengaging means will function to maintain the coil housing in its closed condition. Thereafter, the lead wires can be connected to the terminals by merely inserting the lead wires into the terminal-receiving cavities and into the terminals in the cavities, the same terminals having previously been connected to the coil wires.